Under President Volodymyr Zelensky, the implementation of the law on renaming the UOC, which under Petro Poroshenko, the authorities were going to forcibly rename the largest confession of Ukraine – the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – into the “Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine”, was suspended, but the law itself has not been canceled. This was stated by the chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, according to the communication service of the DECR.

The hierarch recalled that during Petro Poroshenko’s presidency, a discriminatory law was adopted, according to which a religious organization with a center outside Ukraine should have the name of this center in its name.

“The real center of this Church is not in Moscow – it is in Kiev. This is a self-governing Church, which independently determines its internal and foreign policy, elects its bishops without agreement with Moscow, and chooses the head of its Church itself. It is in no way dependent on the Russian Church – neither financially, nor administratively, nor in any other respect,” said Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk.